That was how they lived. He simply lived, with no real goal and no direction, like a river that keeps moving because it doesn’t know how to stand still. He had no idea that five years later, in the hallway of a run-down children’s home, he would meet a look that changed everything.
After prison, Victor rebuilt his life slowly, like laying wet brick. It held together, more or less, but you didn’t want to press on it too hard. The first thing he did was find work.
He walked into a repair company on Industrial Road, set his work record in front of the foreman, and said simply, “Certified welder. Top grade.”
The foreman, a weathered man in his fifties, flipped through the papers, looked at Victor’s hands, and nodded. Not one question about prison. Maybe none was needed.
He lived with Nina Stepanovna, the same landlady whose shed roof he had fixed without being asked. She kept a small vegetable garden, a cat named Tractor, and never asked personal questions. That suited Victor fine.
The room was small. A bed, a table, a window facing the yard, a cracked vent window looking out on a rowan tree. In the mornings Nina Stepanovna left tea and bread in the kitchen.
Quietly, without explanation. Victor ate quietly and left. That went on for a month, then a year, then three.
Nobody owed anybody anything, and that was probably the best kind of peace he knew. At work they respected him, though they didn’t exactly love him. That’s different. People love the ones who talk.
But they respected him. If there was a difficult seam in an awkward position, they called Savelly. If they couldn’t figure out a defect in the metal, they called him too.
He didn’t brag, didn’t explain, just did the job. One day the foreman offered to make him crew lead. Victor turned it down.
He didn’t want extra responsibility for other people’s decisions. In 2003 a new supply manager came to the company, Vasily Petrovich Kuzmin. A former Army warrant officer, loud, good-natured, the kind of man who says hello first even to strangers and never notices if they’d rather he didn’t.
He took to Victor right away. Maybe he recognized another man of few words, just with a different sign in front of the name. They started eating lunch together at the diner across the street.
They spent more time quiet than talking, but that was conversation too. In the evenings Petrovich picked up extra work as maintenance manager at Children’s Home No. 4, an old two-story building that had once belonged to a merchant family and no longer remembered either the family or the garden. Sometimes he talked about it, without pity, without drama, just as a fact.
Too many kids, not enough money, the roof had leaked for three years, the pipes were shot, and the fence had been falling apart since last winter. He said it while chewing a bologna sandwich, like he was talking about the weather. Victor listened and didn’t comment.
Other people’s trouble didn’t pull at him. He was barely managing the business of simply living. The years passed the same way.
Work, supper, a short evening with the newspaper, sleep. Weekends, the bathhouse with Petrovich, sometimes fishing at the river. In spring they caught carp, in fall pike if they were lucky.
They sat on the bank in silence, smoked, watched the water. Life didn’t crush him, but it didn’t call him anywhere either. Victor was forty-seven, and he had gotten used to the idea that nothing special was coming, not because he had made peace with it, but because he had stopped expecting it.
Only sometimes, coming home late through the yard, he would pause by the rowan tree and look at the windows of the neighboring houses. Lights glowed there, voices carried, sometimes a child laughed or feet thumped across a floor. He wasn’t jealous. He just looked.
Then he went back to his room and went to sleep. In March 2006 Petrovich called him at work. His voice sounded apologetic.
“Vic, help me out. The fence at the children’s home is shot. One whole corner came down.”
“Needs welding. Brackets, hinges, reinforcement. My hands are useless, you know that. Can you come Saturday?”
Victor was quiet for a second. “I’ll come,” he said. Nothing more.
All week he didn’t think about it. He didn’t sense anything unusual coming. A fence was just a fence. Work was just work.
On Saturday, April 7, he packed his tools, brought some welding rods, and went to the children’s home. The snow was gone, but the ground hadn’t dried out yet. It squished underfoot.
The chipped front gate stood partly open. From inside came the smell of cooked cereal and bleach. Victor pushed the gate and walked in…
